How Mitt Romney Suckered His Fat-Cat Donors

The big chin-scratching story in the aftermath of the 2012 campaign is that the Romney-Ryan campaign was “shell-shocked” by its loss to Barack Obama. "I don't think there was one person who saw this coming," a senior adviser to the campaign told CBS . “There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't,” said another. “It was like a sucker punch."

The most likely explanation for that yawning disconnect is that the campaign figured it was better to appear to be entirely clueless about the race than acknowledge that it had been bullshitting its fat-cat donors about Romney's chances of winning in order to keep the cash spigot open.

That's not how most people saw it. Many attributed the campaign's apparent surprise to “epistemic closure” – to a campaign deeply ensconced in a conservative media bubble that had been systematically “unskewing” the polls and predicting a Romney victory for months. According to this view, Romney's camp was surrounded by people who saw Barack Obama as an abject failure who was deeply unpopular and had little to no chance of being re-elected.

But that story really isn't plausible. The right's “unskewed” polling project was based on the notion that the 2012 electorate would look like that of the 2010 midterm, when Republicans enjoyed a “wave” election. While the dimmer lights of the right-wing blogosphere may have convinced themselves that this would likely be the case, no serious observer of American politics could really believe that a presidential election year – where around 60 percent of eligible voters go to the polls – could look all that similar to a midterm in which 41 percent turned out (older people and whites tend to be more reliable voters than younger voters and people of color).

It's also true that Mitt Romney didn't lead Barack Obama for a single day of the campaign in Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight forecast, the Princeton Election Consortium's forecast, the Rand Corporation's model or the Electoral College forecasts offered by poll aggregators like Talking Points Memo and Real Clear Politics. The base may have shrugged that off as widespread and systematic “bias” on the part of pollsters and numbers crunchers, but campaign hacks are news junkies and while they could have believed a comeback win was possible, the notion that they saw it as a sure thing – sure enough that Mitt Romney didn't bother to even prepare a concession speech – just doesn't pass the smell test.